Quote of Note | Murray Moss

Better Together. Fernando and Humberto Campana’s “Panda Banquete” and Henri Michaux’s “Composition” (1959) were among the artfully juxtaposed offerings in “Moss, the Auction.”

“My obsession with objects and my (Sergei) Eisensteinian affinity for montage (the juxtaposition of two or more disparate works which thereby create a tertium quid, or third thing, that makes the whole greater than its parts), surfaced when I was eight years old, having decided to take matters into my own hands and redecorate my bedroom. It was a nice square room in an almost-North-Side-Chicago manse, circa 1900. I decided on an ‘Oriental’ motif, due to the fact that the only ‘showroom’ I had ever visited was the Golden Pheasant, the Chinese restaurant where we ate every Sunday. The restaurant had a kind of gift shop filled with accessories. From this one resource I made my first design selections: a pair of porcelain courtiers, a clutch of bobble-head pencils, various calendars with scenes from the Mainland, a brass Pheasant (Golden, of course), and a variety of other forgotten items easily accomodated by my budget, meager as it was. An intractable problem presented itself: the wallpaper in my bedroom was a large ‘Art’ mural made of an American farm scene. Sufficed to say, I was not given the option to change it. As the saying goes, I made it work. I found the links between ‘Barn’ and ‘Pheasant,’ between the pencils and the bobbing necks of barnyard turkeys, and I remember the great pleasure doing so.”

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